Open Alex

What, Why and How

Rainer M Krug (Rainer.Krug@uzh.ch, Rainer@krugs.de)

2024-05-14

What is OpenAlex

General Info

Why OpenAlex

OpenAlex and Open Science

OpenAlex versus others

Number of works OA works Citations Price Data Openness Org structure
OpenAlex 243M 48M 1.9B Freemium Fully open, CC0 license Non-profit
Scopus 87M 20.5M 1.8B Subscription Closed For Profit
Web of Science (core) 87M 12M 1.8B Subscription Closed For Profit
Dimensions 135M 29M 1.7B Freemium Partly open, personal use For Profit
Google Scholar 389M (estimated) ? ? Free Closed For Profit
Crossref 145M 20M 1.45B Free Fully open, CC0 license Non-profit

OpenAlex Coverage

OpenAlex Sources

  • ORCID
  • ROR
  • DOAJ
  • Unpaywall
  • Pubmed
  • Pubmed Central
  • The ISSN International Centre
  • Internet Archive
  • Web crawls
  • Subject-area and institutional repositories from arXiv to Zenodo and many in between

OpenAlex Data Entities

How to use OpenAlex

Also: VOSviewer Slides and Video

GUI

Web Interface

Web Interface

Important points about Search Terms

  • Use AND, OR, NOT in capital letters
  • Use " to search for exact phrases
  • Use ( and ) to group terms
  • Wildcards *? are not supported
  • Stemming is used, so fish will also find fishing

Programmatically (e.g. R)

Search Terms

  • Based on Search Term

  • Inclusive
  • Specificity depend on search terms

Search Terms

library(openalexR)
st <- paste0(
    '
    (biodiversity AND "climate change") AND,
    ("ecosystem services" OR "ecosystem functions") AND
    "land use" AND
    conflict AND
    polar
    '
)

openalexR::oa_fetch(
    entity = "works",
    search = st,
    count_only = TRUE,
    verbose = TRUE
)
     count db_response_time_ms page per_page
[1,]   638                 976    1        1

Snowball Search

library(openalexR)
dois <- c(
    "10.1016/j.marpol.2023.105710",
    "10.1007/s13280-014-0582-z",
    "10.1016/j.cosust.2022.101160"
)
key_works <- oa_fetch(
    entity = "works",
    doi = dois,
    verbose = TRUE
)
snowball <- oa_snowball(
    identifier = key_works$id,
    verbose = TRUE
)
snowball

OpenAlex Webinars

OpenAlex Webinars